Cuban and US team up to fight common enemy – cancer
HAVANA: Diplomatic ties between Cuba and the United States may be strained but the two countries are standing shoulder to shoulder to fight a common enemy: cancer.
The first biotechnical collaboration between the two countries is aiming to test the effectiveness of a Cuban treatment for lung cancer to see whether it could be used for US patients.
Although still in the test stage, the CIMAvax-EGF treatment has made a lot of noise over the last few months, even before the announcement of this unprecedented partnership.
Various Internet sites have claimed it’s a miracle cure, but experts say the truth is more complex than that.
According to Orestes Santos, a researcher at Havana’s molecular immunology centre, rather than a vaccination, the treatment involves the “active immunology” of the so-called EGF, or epidermal growth factor, protein that stimulates cell growth.
“The lung cancer tumor needs EGF to grow and proliferate, and what we’ve done in our center is develop a product that generates antibodies against this protein,” Santos told AFP.
“It’s an extra weapon in the fight against cancer, which combines with other therapeutic weapons like chemotherapy.”
Interested by their work, the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Centre, in Buffalo, New York, formed a partnership with the Cuban centre during a US business mission to the island nation in 2015. That year the two Cold War foes restored diplomatic relations after decades of enmity.
“The Cuban-American enterprise aims to finance the development (of treatment) and bring about new, bigger and more complete clinical tests on American soil,” said Kalet Leon Monzon, assistant director at the considers a renegade province.
The United States also took Beijing’s military to task over its assertive posture in the disputerife South China Sea, which has witnessed a series of incidents molecular immunology center.
The aim is to have the treatment registered by American health authorities so it can be used on patients in the country.
The treatment, which has been administered by monthly injections at the Cuban center since 2011, has already been approved in Bosnia, Paraguay, Peru, Malaysia and Sri Lanka.
“More than 5,000 people worldwide use active immunology with CIMAvax,” said Dr. Soraida Acosta Brooks, president of the clinical tests department in a hospital in Santiago de Cuba.
As it turns out, medical and scientific cooperation between the two countries has always transcended official relations.
Despite the US economic embargo on Cuba implemented in 1962, “it’s one of the last diplomatic levers that was maintained,” says Nils Graber, a PhD student in anthropology at the school of higher education in including the buzzing of a US Navy surveillance aircraft last year by a Chinese warplane.
Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said the talks were “candid” but that the two militaries looked to social sciences in Paris.
“American researchers participated in Cuban conferences and Cuban scientists were trained in the United States.”
Cuba has been a pioneer in the fight against cancer, says Graber, who has written a thesis on the island nation’s scientific innovation.
But he says that “media treatment of Cuba is still binary and Manichean, with announcements of the discovery of a miracle cure... and on the other side articles that immediately try to discredit the Cuban research.”
When it comes to CIMAvax, “it’s untrue.
There’s no miraculous cure developed in Cuba. It’s similar to what’s being done elsewhere.”
All over the world, many researchers are studying immunology — the science of activating the immune system — to tackle cancer. — AFP